Category Archives: Groom

My husband is the mildest of men, even in temperament, gentle in manner. He makes his own yogurt, sweetly wrapping the Mason jars with a blankie while the stuff ferments. When the dishwasher backs up and fills with water, he sighs deeply before strapping on a headlamp and going in. Discovering a tube jammed with […]

Chirp. My brain is asleep. So is my body. The noise doesn’t fully register. After a quick blip of “Huh?” I drop back into the blackness of sleep. Chirp. Hell and damn it. My brain pushes to consciousness like it’s swimming up from the bottom of a murky lake, half panicked, gasping for air. As it […]

“At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.”–Salvador Dali Today, Byron turns 42. He has been, and in some cases still is, son, brother, friend, father, student custard scooper corn cross-pollinator park ranger naturalist anthropology and […]

Back in the 1980s, I did the college gig all traditional-like. Squirming and chafing in Montana, I hit eighteen and began the countdown to flight. When the time came to start college, I viewed the 1,000 miles separating my new campus and my hometown as “a headstart on a life where I don’t work in […]

A pot of water boiled on the burner behind my husband, as he leaned against the stove, pulling my face into his sweatshirt. This story does not end with seared human flesh, so relax, gentle reader. He hugged me to him for a long time, hard. Finally, I managed to choke out, through thick tonsils, […]

For almost nine years, Groom has been our stay-at-home parent (I married him because he was the closest thing to a woman I could find in a man’s body). He is an example of walking Zen, so his temperament has been perfectly suited to taking the kids to storytime at the library, playing soccer in […]

I would have made a great 1950’s housewife–and not just because I can whip up a chrome-plated five-can casserole and smoke and drink like a fiend while pregnant. Witness this exchange between The Groomeo and me, transcribed from the dictaphone in our secretary Miss Walcott’s shorthand during the year 1958: Groom: My ear still hurts. […]

Yesterday, I watched voyeuristically as my country acted the john to another media-Hallmark-florist-driven whore of a holiday. Having steered clear of the entire transaction myself, I had plenty of time to muse on the fact that it was a mutual-antipathy of VD that first watered the love blooming between Groom and me. Oh, plus he […]